Sudan

Northern and southern Sudanese clashed here Tuesday in a second day of violence sparked by the death of former rebel leader John Garang, who helped end two decades of war in Africa's largest country. Authorities sent in police to quell the clashes, which they said had killed 46 people. Garang, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, a southern former rebel group, died in a weekend helicopter crash.

A federal judge ruled in Norfolk that the Sudanese government caused the terrorist bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole and would be liable for damages to the families of the 17 sailors killed in the attack. U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar said he would issue a written opinion later to explain his reasoning. He requested additional paperwork, including tax returns of the sailors killed, to help calculate damages.

Peace talks in Nigeria between Sudan's government and rebels in its Darfur region ended in a deadlock on how to resolve a conflict that has killed an estimated 30,000 people and forced more than 1 million villagers to flee their homes for refugee camps. "There is a big distance between what we think about improving the humanitarian situation in the camps and what the government thinks," said Ahmed Mohammed Tugod, the negotiator for the Justice and Equality Movement rebel group.

Sudan's president on Thursday accused the West of exploiting the Darfur conflict in the hope of seizing the country's gold and oil, but Washington responded that its only aim was to halt mass slayings. Sudan is under intense international pressure to rein in Arab militias accused of sacking villages and raping and killing civilians, and to provide security for more than 1 million people displaced by the turmoil.

This country's transitional government has abolished the Islamic system of taxation introduced in 1984 by deposed President Jaafar Numeiri and will revert to a conventional Western-style system. Finance Minister Awad Abdel-Majeed told a weekend news conference that the transitional government would draft a new tax law along the lines of the 1971 system in the next few days.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell arrived here Tuesday to encourage Sudanese rebels and government officials holding peace talks in the resort town of Naivasha to bring their 20-year war to a speedy resolution. Powell's two-day visit, coming after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Thailand, is largely a symbol of U.S. support, as negotiators say that a peace deal is unlikely before December.

Thousands of residents of Sudan's disputed oil-rich Abyei region continued to flee south Tuesday, along with humanitarian groups attempting to prepare clinics and shelters before the rainy season strands the displaced and renders mostly dirt roads impassable. Chol Anguie, a member the Abyei administrative council, said hundreds of children were separated from their parents when fighting started in the region over the weekend and are searching for their families in towns to the south.

Sudan's interim peace accord will lead to the secession of southern Sudan, opposition leader Hassan Turabi said in remarks published Friday. "The agreement dealt a blow to Sudan, the Arab world and Islam, and it will lead inevitably to the division of Sudan," Turabi told Egypt's weekly magazine Al Ahram al Arabi. Turabi, a hard-line Islamist under house arrest, was speaking about the framework accord signed July 20 in Machakos, Kenya, by the state and the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

Sudan lost its bid to assume the rotating leadership of the African Union to Ghana after regional leaders snubbed Khartoum for a second time because of international outrage over bloodshed in the Darfur region. Alpha Oumar Konare, the African Union's top diplomat, told reporters that Ghanaian President John Kufuor would take the chairman post.

Re "U.N. to Send 10,700 Peacekeepers to Sudan," March 25: In an interview last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described how the U.S. has "worked very hard" in responding to genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Two years into this crisis, and 200 days since the Bush administration acknowledged that this was "genocide," the actions described by Rice remain absolutely insufficient. The government of Sudan continues to wage its genocidal campaign with impunity, the death toll in Darfur has reached at least 50,000 and the U.S. has failed to invest in pushing for a robust international response to this crisis.